Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

Last year the Pentium 4 was beginning to show its true colours as a top performance desktop CPU, but it was still squarely outmatched in the value stakes by the new Athlon processor. DDR RAM was also becoming the standard, with SDRAM finally going the way of the extinct plankton, graptolites.

Motherboards. The Labs this month is absolutely filled to the brim with them. Not only do we have our massive motherboard Labs, but with all the testing needed for our upgrade feature, the Labs team have been knee deep in components all month. As such, we’ve hereby dubbed this month 'Australian International Month of the Mobo’ in the Labs. Ahh, it all took me back to my Labs days of fiddling with SIMMs, DIMMs and RIMMs, probing BIOSes and hacking the registry to get stubborn drivers and benchmarks to work…

We provide the commentary on a bruising eight-round battle between Vista and Tiger.

We've taken seven top business PCs and run them through their paces to find out which should be your next upgrade.

Something’s wrong with DirectX 10 gaming when even top end cards are struggling with the latest games.

Australian broadband now half way there: continues to live on prayer

This rather unusual system from MCT has a bit of everything.

Many people upgrade their PCs by adding the latest CPU or more memory, but leave their old hard disk in place. The humble hard disk is one of the slowest components inside a PC (in fact, only optical

Why some argue Bill Gates effectively "saved" Apple on this day in 1997. Also: the official Windows 7 upgrade chart, win a Canon EOS 500D

Samsung’s new Flash disk can extend battery life and boost performance – at a price

Built-in tracing and improved drawing, formatting and colour correction make X3 the best CorelDRAW upgrade in years.

Wondering what to do with your tax return? Here's our list of "if-only" technology products that might be in your reach after your tax return.

The P45 chipset takes the stability of the P35 chipset and introduces support for PCI Express 2.0 - the latest standard for graphic cards. If you were waiting for the best choice of upgrade for an existing LGA775 system, or want a board for a budget system, this is definitely the chipset of choice. It's great time to bag an upgrade. What better gift for the DIY geek in your household?

The JNC has a reasonable range of features, including FM radio and voice recording, although no capacity for storage expansion. It can be also used as removable storage, for any file type. The software includes a simple tool to format the device, a firmware upgrade utility and RealOne Player Gold. There is no support for playlists, however, unless created within the player itself.

TrueSpace has always led the pack in terms of features as far as Windows 3D animation packages under $2,000 are concerned. Recently, however, the market has become rather crowded, with a powerful upgrade to Ray Dream (reviewed issue 9, p100) and the cut-down version of LightWave 3D (Inspire 3D) both challenging it on features and price.

Jacinta Thomler shows, you the ins and outs of buying almost anything online. Realising that your old computer is in serious need of an upgrade, you surf the Web to find the model

The Techmart SOHO is the only system in this roundup to be supplied with a copy of Windows XP Home rather than XP Professional. This highlights Intermedia's emphasis on the small office, home office environment with this system, where the additional networking features of XP Pro aren't necessary. Even so, it does mean you'll be restricted to using a peer-to-peer network, and you'll need an upgrade if you ever want to set up a client-server system. For the extra $90, it might be worth future-proofing and upgrading to Pro.

Are you kicking around an old clunky PC that looks like a relic from the Stone Age? Google Zeitgeist (www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html) tells us that while Windows XP accounted for 46 percent of the OSs used to search Google during February 2004, 24 percent were still using Windows 98 and Windows 95, indicating there are still a lot of late-1990s PCs kicking around. Even if you’re running something from the 1GHz days, it’s probably time to think about an upgrade. But it can easily get to the point where you’re upgrading just about every component. In that case, you should seriously consider looking at the excellent bargains available in new PCs today.